Lost in Paradise

by Experimental

Follows Damaged and Gone to Earth. On the surface, it's return to status quo for Enma-cho, but nothing is the same. Tsuzuki is still missing, for certain in Muraki's clutches. And this time Hisoka isn't sure the damage he caused is something anyone, least of all he, can fix. Though he will try, even if it costs him his existence.

36. Paradise revisited

Author's note: Apologies in advance to my readers, for this is the epilog that would not end. I wanted to make sure that every thread in this monster of a story got some sort of satisfactory ending (or new beginning, as the case may be) in this chapter, so please bear with me until the ride comes to a complete stop.

---

{Out on the new horizon

You may see the floating motion of a distant pair of wings

And if the sleep has left your ears

You might hear footsteps running through an open meadow

You might have seen me runnin'

Through the long abandoned ruins of the dreams you left behind

If you remember something there that glided past you

Followed close by heavy breathin'}

The lines float to his mind from some long forgotten song he can't seem to forget, not making any sense even though he understands the English words. Like sunshine streaming through the lids of his eyes when sleep won't let him open them.

What time is it? Where am I?

That's right. The Castle. It is his existence now, this beautiful place, this gilded cage, whose boundaries extend so far he wonders if he'll ever find them. This is home, though he feels a stranger in it still. A heaven, but nonetheless a hell.

The hall of candles calls to him as it always does. Like an altar to something good, something he wants but doesn't know how to ask for, or if he even deserves.

Inevitably he ends up there. Not sure why. Just to watch them, perhaps. To watch their gentle flicker and see which ones will wink out and which will flare into existence, like novas in a night sky. To compare his observations to the notes which appear without any hand to write them in the tome that stands in the antechamber. Looking for errors in a report he can't explain, like trying to diagnose a patient from afar.

Diagnose a patient. Somehow that feels truer than whatever it is he's doing here. But the choice is no longer his. He put himself on this path.

—Or did he? He remembers, but can't see the memory. Doors in his own castle whose keys he has not yet found. Or a butterfly, floating always just out of reach of his net.

A pang, stabbing through his brain like a pick of sunlight, and he puts his hand to his ruined eye. Is disappointed, as he always is, to find nothing there.

But for the briefest of moments it felt as though it had all come back to him. A tear falls from his other eye, in mourning of what he knows he doesn't know he's lost. Just a name, that he holds close to his chest. A whisper. A prayer. "Tsuzuki."

"Sir? Will you take some coffee?"

That voice he knows better than he would know the voices of his own parents, and he fixes the smile to his lips before he turns. As if adjusting a mask.

"If you're making it, Sakaki, yes. A cup of coffee would be most welcome."

A mask, hm? But of what?

And just who is behind it?

---

Sakaki closed the grand double doors behind him before allowing himself a small sigh. He pitied Kazutaka, wanted to help him, but knew there was nothing he could do. Nothing, that was, except what he had done for Kazutaka in life.

It was a week since the doctor was made master of the Castle, and each day unfolded as though it were Kazutaka's first.

"Will he ever recover his memory?" Sakaki had asked the Count when Watson had finished going over his new duties.

The Count hummed while he adjusted his cutaway coat. "Difficult to say. He should. I did. How long it will take—that is another story. There was quite a bit that had to be blocked out."

"His death was particularly traumatic, from what I've been given to understand." Sakaki had been told something about a dragon and near-decapitation before declining to hear any more. But that did not explain everything. Sakaki's own death had been anything but a pleasant slip from consciousness to Meifu, but he had been allowed to retain his memories from life.

"Muraki knew too much," the Count corrected his assumption. "Enma feared it might endanger the Doctor's position if he were allowed to transition as he was, with his mind and all its arcane knowledge fully intact. This way, there is at least a chance for a fresh start. Enma and I—particularly I—would prefer that the Doctor did not need to be removed from this post so soon after being put in it."

The Doctor. In Sakaki's talks with the Count, it had become more than just a descriptor, or a title of respect. It was becoming a name in its own right. A persona by which Kazutaka might shelter from the negative associations the Muraki name carried in this place.

And it was fitting that a Doctor should replace a Count—whose own name, Sakaki now understood, had also been purposefully obfuscated. The Count always spoke of the Castle of Candles as a prison, but perhaps King Enma had understood that what his captive had needed was in fact a place to hide from the outside world and lick his wounds.

Until hiding was no longer necessary. Or possible.

"When he does come back to himself," the Count said, running the brim of his top hat idly between his fingers, "I trust you will know what to do to mitigate the damage. From what I hear, you knew the Doctor in life better than anyone."

There was one more that Sakaki might have put above himself. Surely the Mibu lad knew Kazutaka in ways Sakaki never had. But that was the way of his charge. Kazutaka gave a different piece of himself to each of the few people he felt any genuine affection for. Like blind men describing an elephant, neither he nor Oriya nor Ukyou—nor even Tsuzuki, surely—could say they had a good grasp of the whole.

Then I am not yet out of it, Sakaki thought. And though that should have filled him with trepidation and concern for his master, it excited him as well. What Enma had granted Sakaki was a second chance—an afterlife to do right by Muraki Yukitaka's wishes, where in life he had failed.

"In the meantime, I entrust you with the run of the place. Are you sure you'll be able to handle all the responsibilities of managing this estate?"

As if Sakaki had a choice now. "Well, it is a bit larger than what I'm used to," he began, at which the Count chuckled.

"Watson speaks highly of your competence, and if he has faith in you, then so do I."

He smiled at Sakaki as he placed the hat atop his head and extended his gloved hand. And Sakaki was struck by a queer feeling that there was something of Kazutaka in those larger-than-life, noble features and careful, somewhat affected mannerisms and voice. They might have been relations, if Kazutaka had been born with dark hair instead of light, or violet eyes. Somehow he resembled this man more than he took after his own grandfather.

Though Sakaki was sure he must have merely imagined it.

---

It was bright sunlight that coaxed Hisoka awake, streaming through the window and knocking softly on his eyelids, reflecting off the white sheets. He knew this particular melange of clean and chemical scents, knew he was back in the infirmary, in the same bed he'd woken in the last time he was badly burned.

He remembered Suzaku's flames lashing over him. He could feel bandages covering different parts of his body, sticking to wounds that had begun to scab over. But Hisoka couldn't feel the pain, and the memories felt as though they had happened to someone else.

He felt new, remade. Warm. Pleasantly so. So warm and comfortable, like floating on a cloud. He didn't want to wake up, or move. Ever. Because he knew once he did, this pleasantness would end.

But his body insisted it was either one or the other, so he opened his eyes.

And saw Tsuzuki staring back at him, his head resting on the pillow beside Hisoka's.

"Hey," Hisoka said, prompting a sad little smile. The word came out like water trying to push through a pipe half-filled with sand.

But why was Tsuzuki's smile was so sad? They'd all made it through, hadn't they?

"Hey, sleepy-head," Tsuzuki whispered. He may as well have been talking about himself. He had one hand curled under his cheek as he lay stretched out beside Hisoka, over the blanket and on the very edge of the bed, and the lazy dampness in his eyes told Hisoka he must have fallen asleep there.

Is that why I don't feel any pain? Is that why my body feels so heavy, so quiet? Leave it to Tsuzuki to dampen the noise that otherwise never seemed to cease in Hisoka's soul. Without even meaning to.

Then, all at once, it hit Hisoka. He's still here. He still wants to be near me. Tears welled up and flowed freely down his face, tears of gratitude.

Tsuzuki must have taken them another way. Remembering what had happened the last time they shared so intimate a space, he shot up from the bed, saying, "I'm sorry, I should have—I know it's too soon—"

But Hisoka sat up and grabbed his wrist before Tsuzuki could leave the bedside completely.

It happened so quickly, it was as though his hand had a life of its own. But Hisoka meant it with all his soul when he said, "Please stay. Please. I don't want to be alone. And part of me's afraid that if you go now, you'll disappear."

Tsuzuki kept his expression in check, too unsure, it seemed, to move one way or the other. But Hisoka felt it, the skip in his partner's heart at those words. There was hope in them.

They were still partners, weren't they? Hisoka saw the glowing lines encircling Tsuzuki's wrist beneath his watch, and turned it over in his grip. Even though bandages covered them up, he knew by feel that similar lines encircled his own. "So, Enma did renew our binding spell."

"That's not a problem, is it?"

Hisoka shook his head. He let go of Tsuzuki's wrist. "It just seems stronger than before. Deeper, er, more indelible. Like it's been reinforced."

"To make sure I won't try to break it without permission again." Tsuzuki cracked a wry smile as he leaned back against the window sill. Though it fell away just as quickly. "But I can't complain. There are worse people to be bound to. At least that's one thing you don't have to worry about anymore."

Then, at Hisoka's blank look: "Your scars. They must be gone now, right? If Muraki's death doesn't finally free you from his curse . . ."

Tsuzuki trailed off as Hisoka shook his head.

"They'll come back," Hisoka told him, looking down at his bandaged arms. "It doesn't matter if Muraki's dead or however many times I burn them off. They'll always be a part of me, for as long as I exist. At least, I hope they will."

"Wait. What do you mean, you hope?"

Why would Hisoka expect him to understand? For as long as he'd known Tsuzuki, that curse had been the bane of Hisoka's existence and his reason for being—the physical manifestation of his never-ending desire for revenge. Hisoka couldn't say himself when the switch had been flipped, only that the understanding he had gained in the last few months had forced a new perspective on him. One he didn't wholly resent.

Perhaps it was his conversation with Enma that had finally cemented it. Enma was right: They could either endure the challenges and suffering that came their way or cease. And Hisoka wanted to endure, even if it was the more difficult option.

"It's strange, but I suppose in a way I should actually be grateful to Muraki.

"I know it sounds wrong," Hisoka added quickly, before Tsuzuki could interrupt him, "it still feels wrong to say it out loud, after everything he did to me—and to you. I don't expect I'll ever forgive him for that. But the truth is, I wouldn't be here if not for him. Somehow his curse sealed off the part of Yatonokami that was inside me. I don't think he meant it to, I think it was a completely unintended side effect, but it stopped Yatonokami from growing and taking over my body. If I hadn't met Muraki that night . . ."

Hisoka shook away the spectre of memory—but this time, not of the cherry trees and the lunar eclipse, but of the future he'd never had. And, thankfully, never would. "I don't want to think about what I might have become."

That was all Tsuzuki could stand. Whether it was this talk about thanking Muraki, or Hisoka so calmly mentioning the monster within his own body that they had barely even begun to parse, it was all just a little too much.

The next thing Hisoka knew, Tsuzuki was on his knees at the bedside, clutching the blanket tight in this fists.

"I'm sorry," he whispered into it. Hisoka couldn't see his face, but he could hear Tsuzuki's tears. "For everything, Hisoka. I wish I could tell you how sorry I am."

He didn't need to. Hisoka could feel it, shuddering through him. "Tsuzuki, I already said I forgive you. You don't need to say it—"

"But I do! The same way you needed me to hear you say those words, I need you to hear me now. Even if you don't believe me, I need to say them, as much for my own sake as for yours, before I can even start to make amends for hurting you. If that makes any sense."

It made more sense than Hisoka could say. Forgiving Tsuzuki had been as much a selfish act as a last-ditch effort to reach him through his guilt. For his own well-being, Hisoka had made that choice. Knowing that even if he had failed, if Enma had decided to destroy Tsuzuki—or both of them—Hisoka would have at least, in those final moments, unburdened his soul and set himself free.

"And I do want to make amends," Tsuzuki said. "I know I damaged things between us beyond what can ever be fully repaired. But I can accept that. I can accept something that's cracked and has pieces missing and ugly marks that can't be scoured away, no matter how hard I work to try and make things better—as long as I still have you beside me. That's all that matters—"

He broke off with a whimper, and for a moment Hisoka thought that Tsuzuki was trying to stifle a sob. But no sobs wracked his body. Tsuzuki just clutched and twisted the blanket even tighter in his hands, in silent desperation. In utter subjugation.

He looked so small like that, like a child praying at his bedside, longing for God to hear him. Hisoka wanted to reach out to him, to calm his fears, tell him he was heard—but he knew he didn't have a right to silence Tsuzuki. He had no right to stop these tears.

The same way that Tsuzuki clutched at that blanket, because he no longer had the right to cling to Hisoka.

"Please stay with me," Tsuzuki begged nonetheless. As if it were all up to Hisoka. As if Enma had given them a choice in the matter. "I don't want any other partner but you. Until the very end."

Hisoka did reach out to him then. Tentatively laying a hand on the crown of his head at first. Then, when it wasn't enough, carding his fingers through Tsuzuki's hair. "I'm not going anywhere," Hisoka told him.

Because assurance was what Tsuzuki deserved right at that moment. That was what was right to give him. It wasn't a lie, or an empty promise. It wasn't misleading. It was nothing more or less than what Tsuzuki needed to hear.

Tsuzuki turned to look at Hisoka at that touch, his eyes red and overflowing and beautiful. And Hisoka could feel that what Tsuzuki most wanted to do was seize Hisoka's hand in his and kiss it madly—bury his face in it until he had filled Hisoka's hand with all the gratitude he felt inside.

Instead, Tsuzuki settled for a smile. And that was good enough.

---

The Peacekeeping Division was, for the first time in a long time, a place of peace. To be sure, a low-key sense of anxiety pervaded the office with no department head to lead it (despite his plot to replace Enma with Muraki, no one could deny Todoroki had kept a tight ship), but with no emergencies breaking out as the cleanup of Enma-cho began in earnest, everyone either knew their role or found one quickly.

It didn't take long for the assignment of a new chief to come down from Enma. Kazuma was summoned to the offices of Judgment to receive it herself.

When Nonomiya saw her again a short time later, something about Shin had changed. She held herself a little straighter, with a silly smile constantly breaking out on her face.

"It's good news, I take it by your grin," Nonomiya said, rising from the piles of paperwork she had been organizing. "Who's the unlucky person? Anyone we know?"

"You could say that," Kazuma said mysteriously. "I think you'll like King Enma's choice, in any case."

But she was being stubbornly slow revealing the answer, and Nonomiya finally had to prod Kazuma in the shoulder before she would say who had been appointed the new chief of Peacekeeping.

"It's me, as a matter of fact," Kazuma said. "Apparently my name was submitted with the Count's emphatic recommendation. I think there were something in it about 'subduing Great King Enma's foes in the Bureau's darkest hour,' or something like that." And Nonomiya was so thrilled for her that she wanted to scream.

She settled for throwing her arms around Kazuma's shoulders in a congratulatory hug instead. "Oh, Shin! What an honor!"

"I turned it down."

Nonomiya was only taken aback by that news for a moment. She could understand how Kazuma might be overwhelmed by the prospect of so much responsibility so soon. "You would have made a great chief, though. No one here would be surprised—except maybe Endo, but who cares what he thinks? And I know how much you enjoy giving orders."

Kazuma had to concede that point. "We both know this department needs someone a bit more level-headed than me to run it, though—someone who actually has experience directing a coordinated defensive action from the Security Command Center. Someone who doesn't hesitate to do the right thing, even if it occasionally goes against protocol. Someone who would never even think of setting her officers at odds against one another."

She handed Nonomiya the manila envelope she had been carrying, the one that Nonomiya thought contained Kazuma's official orders.

"I told Judgment I was grateful for their consideration," Kazuma said, "but that I humbly requested to be appointed Secretary of the Peacekeeping Division. So long as you, Kochou, were appointed division chief in my stead. A request, I'm happy to say, they were very quick to approve."

"You're serious? I . . . I don't know what to say." Nonomiya felt she would burst with gratitude. It was too generous an offer. Could she even carry out the duties of a division head?

She squared her shoulders at the thought. Of course she could. The very fact that she questioned her ability to do so already separated her markedly from Todoroki. "I promise to do my utmost to make you and our colleagues proud."

"At that I have no doubt you'll succeed," Kazuma beamed, "because you already have. Kochou-kachou."

"Yeah." Nonomiya matched her smile, but her tone was dead-serious. "You're not calling me that."

"Aww, come on, Kochou~, if you knew how long I've waited—"

"Nope. 'Chief Nonomiya' or 'ma'am' will do quite well from now on, thank you very much."

"Then I take it back. They came to me with the job first, so if you think about it, I have the final say—"

"Ah-ah, no take-backsies. You made your bed, Secretary Kazuma, so lie in it."

"Yeah, but that was before I realized what a megalomaniac you really are!"

Nonomiya laughed as she put a hand on her waist, and cocked her hip in what Kazuma would forever onward think of as her Boss Pose. "Don't you have a trip to pack for?"

That's right! Kazuma did have a big trip coming up. One last hurrah before taking on her duties as Peacekeeping Secretary.

And a big decision to make. She would have to prepare herself, mentally and physically.

---

This time, when Hisoka returned to the Summons office, he felt like a ghost. Perhaps Tatsumi had spoken to his coworkers about it, because no one stopped what they were doing to make a big fuss of welcoming him back.

Which was exactly the way he wanted it.

Saya and Yuma were pouring over their latest fashion magazine, Watari tinkering with some device that resembled a giant hockey puck with brushes and a motor in its undercarriage.

At his desk by the window, Terazuma was being accosted by two of the visiting Kanawa sisters, who were trying to thrust a box of chocolates and bottle of cognac on him. "Keep them, really," Terazuma was saying as he pushed the gifts back, "I don't want them!"

"Stop being ungrateful and let us show our appreciation for watching over our little sister!" Yukiko was warbling through gritted teeth.

"It's more than you deserve for getting her into a brawl with Gozu's goons," Tsukiko added in her most threatening soprano.

"I know how it is with you sisters," said Terazuma. "You flatter with one hand and slap with the other!"

Wakaba, meanwhile, just demurely covered her laugh and watched the exchange from the next desk over.

"How do I know these aren't laced with something?"

Tsukiko gasped. "I'm shocked you would even think we would lower ourselves to such a cheap tactic!"

"You said it, Tsukiko. We intend to beat you at the next New Year's games fair and square! Hajime-chan."

At their own desk, Tsuzuki watched the exchange and smiled. It was just like Hisoka remembered: looking up from his report and seeing his partner completely distracted by something other than work. It made him feel rather nostalgic.

The only obvious difference was K. When she saw Hisoka heading their way, she jumped up from Tsuzuki's lap with a jingle of her bell, and walked over to the edge of Hisoka's desk to greet him, her tail held high.

"K, what are you doing here?" Hisoka said to her as he scratched around her ears. "And where's Natsume?" Hisoka didn't see him anywhere.

"They're no longer partners," Tsuzuki said. "Apparently on the night of Ashtaroth's invasion Natsume proved he no longer needs K to keep him in check. So she's been assigned to us for a while. Well," he amended, "to me, really. Just when we're out on a case. To make sure I don't go rogue while we're in Chijou."

Tsuzuki said it with a smile on his face, but the words must have pained him. "Does Enma really think you'll lose control in the Living World?" Hisoka asked.

"I think it's more a precaution than anything. To ensure the safety of living bystanders. Or to spy on us. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure which."

Hisoka had to concur, the latter sounded closer to the truth.

"What about you? You're sure you're ready to be back at the office, Hisoka? The chief said you should take as much time as you need to recover."

"My burns are all healed." But even as he said so, Hisoka tugged the cuffs of his long-sleeved T-shirt down farther over his wrists, as if he could still feel the itch of the bandages that had come off last night. Only then did it occur to him that might not have been what Tsuzuki meant. "Besides, I'm eager to return to a sense of normal- . . . -cy. . . ."

This, however, was not what he had in mind. Muraki chose that moment to sweep through Summons' door, looking as hale as he ever did in life and dressed once again in his trademark white suit. Panic rose like clockwork inside Hisoka when the doctor's gaze locked on to their desk and he headed their way.

Though he seemed to only have eyes for one of them. While the entire Summons Office watched, Muraki thrust a huge bouquet of crimson-purple roses—and just about himself, as well—into Tsuzuki's arms.

Or what might have been Tsuzuki's arms, if he hadn't raised his hands just in time in a desperate effort to try and ward Muraki off. "Oh God," Tsuzuki muttered in utter humiliation, "he brought flowers this time. . . ."

"This time?" said Hisoka, but Muraki thoroughly ignored him. Which, all things considered, was a blessing.

"Not just any flowers," Muraki purred, as if there were no one else around but he and Tsuzuki. "Imagine my delight when I found roses that matched the precise color of your eyes blooming vivaciously in my garden, as if sprung there by Providence herself."

"Providence had nothing to do with it," said a furiously blushing Tsuzuki, who was trying and failing to worm out from under Muraki's attentions. It only resulted in getting him trapped between Muraki and his own desk.

In the background, Terazuma was miming puking into his wastebasket, earning him a slap on the back of the head from Wakaba's rolled-up magazine. Saya was hiding her blush or giggle or both behind her case file while Yuma was barely holding back a squee.

So Tsuzuki could count on no help from that lot. "It was the Count," he told Muraki, to no avail, "and he planted them there for that reason, because he's almost as big a pervert as you. What are you doing here, anyway? Bugging me at my place of work— Don't you have candles to watch or something?"

"Candles?" Hisoka could feel his stomach sinking further moment by moment with dread.

"So, you haven't heard," Watari sidled up to Hisoka, new toy tucked under his arm. "The Count's retiring."

For shinigami, retirement usually referred to reincarnation or a one-way trip to some utopian realm, or else the oblivion of non-being, as reward for time served. But Hisoka was under the impression the Count wasn't a shinigami, or even really human. Did the same rules still apply to him, whatever he was? "Can he do that?"

"Er, it's not retirement like you and I might receive," Watari backtracked. "But Enma needed to find someone to take his place, and after Muraki died fighting Ashtaroth, I suppose His Magnificence figured the Doctor was the most qualified candidate for the job. He is unusually powerful for a human being, I will give him that. About all I'll give him. . . ."

That wasn't the half of it, Hisoka thought. If everything Tsuzuki had told him was true, Muraki was also the Count's biological grandson. The Castle was his inheritance, in the same way Tsuzuki had thought of the Count's mask as his. To speak nothing of Muraki's preternatural abilities.

K looked up at Hisoka from her perch on his desk, and if I cat could roll its eyes, Hisoka was sure that was what she did.

And Natsume knew something like this would happen. Not the specifics, perhaps, but he had warned Hisoka that Enma wouldn't let a prize like Muraki slip away, once the doctor's soul fell into his hands. This is exactly what Natsume wanted to prevent. I should have tried harder to help him. If I'd known what was in store. . . .

"I suppose making him the new master of the Castle of Candles is the best way to keep him from getting into trouble," Watari went on. "And to ensure his loyalty. There're powerful spells on that place. Programming the likes of which's beyond even my understanding. Binding Muraki's soul to it—it's a little like having a T. rex on a chain, guarding your most precious treasure from your enemies."

So long as said T. rex doesn't turn on you, Hisoka thought. Or eat your treasure. If it were up to him, he wouldn't leave Muraki in charge of watching over a hamster, let alone the lives of all the mortals under Enma's jurisdiction.

But Enma must have seen something in Muraki Hisoka never could. Which was why Enma stood as Judge over the dead, and Hisoka didn't. Could he ever find the strength within himself to look for the redeemable in a man like Muraki? Just trying to imagine it made Hisoka sick to his stomach.

"He even acts like the Count." Muraki currently had Tsuzuki bent backwards over his own desk, and was murmuring something about gladly relenting with the office visits once Tsuzuki agreed to come see him, alone, at the Castle. Which Tsuzuki vehemently insisted would only happen over his dead body. Which, of course, didn't have the impact it might have if either one of them were still alive.

By the door, white trench coat draped over his arm, Muraki's butler apologized to Tatsumi, whose fragile smile Hisoka could feel cracking like a thin sheet of ice from across the room. A few weeks ago, it would have been Watson standing in his place, apologizing for the Count's inappropriate visits. Hisoka missed the tiny butler and his rotting face already.

"Ah. Yes, they do share an uncanny resemblance, don't they?" Watari hummed. "I wonder if that might have more to do with his missing memory, though."

"What do you mean? Are you saying Muraki doesn't remember who he is?" Does he remember what he did to us? Does he remember what he did to me?

"It was the same for all of us when we started here, Bon. Come to think of it, some of us have never completely recovered. You were a little quicker to bounce back than most, so it's understandable if the Doctor's condition might seem a bit disturbing to you. It'll all come back to him eventually. Just not too soon, I hope."

"Normally I'd agree with you, but this is surreal."

"Surreal I'll take, and gladly. Just think what these little visits are gonna be like when he does remember us."

As if reading Hisoka's thoughts—and, who knew, perhaps Hisoka had unintentionally projected a little—Muraki looked up then and caught his eye. His own artificial one, Hisoka noticed, was hidden from them by the curtain of his hair, brushed forward and held there behind his glasses as if to hide something verboten, like a self-destruct button, from view.

For the moment their gazes held, Hisoka wondered if Muraki could feel all the hatred Hisoka still harbored toward the doctor—if he could hear, echoing in his skull, every time Hisoka had sworn to himself over the years that he would make Muraki pay for taking his life, for the way he had hurt him. And his fear, the fear that always took over Hisoka's body when he was this close to his murderer—an irrational fear, he knew, but there nonetheless, that somehow, despite the public place and everyone who surrounded them, Muraki might reach out for him at the slightest provocation and pull him down and make Hisoka relive the night of his rape all over again.

But then Muraki said to Tsuzuki, "Your partner and I seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. I daresay I've made him jealous," and the danger passed. If not the fear.

So Muraki didn't remember him. Yet, anyway.

Tsuzuki glanced at Hisoka over his shoulder, and upon seeing his distress, pushed Muraki off himself with a hard shove. "Okay, that's enough for today. Thank you for the flowers (inappropriate as they are) but you need to leave."

"At least say you'll stop in sometime for a cup of coffee. You know how lonely that house gets—"

"Fine, fine. Whatever. Just leave me the hell alone." And Tsuzuki tore the roses out of Muraki's hand and strode quickly to the storage closet to find the vase he had used for the Count's bouquets, not so long ago.

Hisoka hadn't been prepared for that to hurt as much as it did. Knowing that while he had been out of it, recovering from his wounds, Muraki and Tsuzuki had had time not just to re-establish, but to become comfortable with this running gag. This time in what felt to Hisoka a far more intimate setting. The Summons Office should by rights have been Hisoka's one refuge from Muraki. And now it seemed not even his coworkers were willing to stop him from entering it.

But what should Hisoka have expected, after watching Tsuzuki melt under the doctor's attentions for six long years already? That one day Tsuzuki would wake up and hate Muraki as much as Hisoka did? Was Muraki right—was Hisoka really jealous, that his own touch couldn't possess Tsuzuki like that man's did? That he couldn't overcome his own past and his own nature and reach out for human affection like Muraki had no trouble doing?

Or was Hisoka just needlessly torturing himself, asking these questions he would never find satisfactory answers to?

With Tsuzuki occupied, Muraki turned his attention fully to Hisoka. If Watari hadn't been standing beside him, Hisoka wasn't sure what he would have done.

But he held his ground while Muraki's good eye scrutinized him. "Kurosaki . . . is it? I have this strange feeling when I look at your face . . . like we've met before."

"I must just have one of those faces," Hisoka shot back, jaw clenched so hard it hurt. His curse scars flared with his hatred and anger and panic, and he would have been surprised if Muraki didn't feel it too. "Everyone thinks they know me."

Clearly, that was not it. But if Muraki was in on the joke, he was not eager to let on. "Sure," he smiled, just a touch of the old malice in it, "that must be it. Well, then. I look forward to getting to know you better."

When Muraki did not get a fast enough move on, K hopped up on Hisoka's shoulder and hissed a warning at the doctor. "All right," he said to her, "I can take a hint," and continued on his way.

Only when he and Sakaki were out the door could Hisoka let out the breath he was holding, and then everything else wanted to come out with it. "This is outrageous!" he hissed at Watari, limbs trembling and hands balled tight into fists as Hisoka just tried to keep from exploding and causing a bigger scene. "How can Enma allow this?! Is this what he calls justice?! Are we just supposed to pretend this is normal from now on?"

"I'm afraid so," Tatsumi said. "But I have spoken with Mr. Sakaki and Chief Konoe at length about the matter, and we will see what we can do to limit the Doctor's excursions outside the Castle." The gravity of Tatsumi's expression did not escape Hisoka's notice as he handed him a fancy envelope, embossed and made of expensive card stock.

Hisoka's dread must also have shown on his face. Sakaki must have given the envelope to Tatsumi while the two were talking. "What is it?"

"A little something from the Count."

"The Count?" Watari scoffed. "It better be an award for saving the day, 'cause Bon deserves a knighthood, or at very least a dining club card with no spending limit, for what he did."

Tatsumi smiled. "Maybe it is. I have no idea. It's not for my eyes to see. And do I even want to know why you've been carrying around a wash basin all morning?"

"It's an autonomous vacuuming robot! Isn't it cute? These things are gonna be all the rage one day. I call this little guy Unicron."

"By any chance can you tell Unicron to stay away from my work area, Watari? It would be unfortunate if anything were to happen to him so soon after joining our team."

"It's addressed to me and Tsuzuki," Hisoka said, after turning the envelope over. "And Terazuma."

"Me?" Terazuma perked up at his desk. "Why me?"

Tsuzuki bounded over at his name, though not before setting the vase of roses safely on the corner of his desk. He flashed an apologetic look at Hisoka before the excitement of opening a present from the Count got the better of him. Even K leaned eagerly over Hisoka's collarbone as he fumbled with the card inside. "Well? What does it say?"

"It's an invitation. He wants the three of us to join him on a 'relaxing meditative retreat' in Gensoukai."

"Gensoukai? Seriously?" The matter of Muraki momentarily forgotten, Tsuzuki glowed at the prospect of seeing his shikigami in their world again. "I mean," he turned to Tatsumi, "if the chief will let us go. After what I pulled, I figured Enma would forbid me from taking any trips to the Imaginary World for another decade."

But Tatsumi chuckled. "If it's from the Count, I doubt King Enma will forbid it. He's probably already given his consent."

"But our case load—" Hisoka began.

And was waved short by Watari. "Will be taken care of in your absence. You two need a chance to recover more than just physically, if you're going to give your cases your hundred-and-ten percent."

He did have a point. If Hisoka were honest, they had probably jumped back into case work too quickly after Tsuzuki's return to Enma-cho.

Now that the idea was in Hisoka's mind, he was looking forward to being in Gensoukai again, too. There was an inherent peacefulness to that world, even when its denizens were bickering with one another, that could only serve to hasten their recuperation.

Though whether that would still be the case with the Count tagging along was yet to be determined.

---

Asai never truly understood what was meant by "survivor's guilt" until he stood before the empty desk that once belonged to Detective Imai.

All the pats on the back, the "Welcome back"s and "Good to see you"s that didn't feel entirely genuine—all of that just left him feeling numb, and at a loss as to how to reply. Seeing his own desk looking much the same as how he had left it, and the one right next to it stripped of anything that might have indicated who had occupied it before him . . . Asai knew it was irrational, but he couldn't help thinking that the wrong guy had been killed that night.

"What'd they do with all Sempai's stuff?" he asked when Sato approached to give his condolences.

Sato and Imai had never gotten along as long as Asai had been with the department, but now he wondered if the rivalry was all for show. An act they had put on so often, competing for cases and resources, that they had begun to believe their dislike for one another was genuine.

Sato indicated with a jerk of the head for Asai to follow him to the break room. Once there, he pulled a file box out from one of the cabinets, and handed it over. It was incredibly light in Asai's arms, much lighter than he had expected.

"We didn't know what to do with it," Sato said, avoiding looking at the burn scars on Asai's face, just like everyone else in the station did. "I know he's got a niece and nephew in Fukuoka, but we weren't sure they'd want it, or if we should send it to his ex—"

"I'll take care of it," Asai assured him, and was grateful when Sato didn't fight him on the matter. When it came down to it, Asai had been the closest thing Imai had to a next-of-kin at the end of his life.

When Asai had a chance to examine the contents, that was when it hit him, finally hit him, that Imai was gone. There wasn't even that much to represent his life. A Mr. Donut mug and a tiny ceramic rooster and some pens with a bank's logo on them. A service award that Asai had maybe seen once before Imai abashedly tucked it away. A philodendron that had seen better days. . . .

It was the framed photograph of two smiling kids, sitting on a pier with fishing poles, that captured Asai's attention. A boy and a girl, about eight and ten years of age. They must have been teenagers by now, at least, but keeping the picture updated hadn't been the important part to Imai.

Asai could still remember asking about the photo casually, without thinking there might be any reason to tread delicately around the subject. "How come you didn't tell me you had kids, Sempai?"

"They're my big sis's," Imai had said as he swiveled in his chair. "That was a few years ago, though. They've grown up since then."

They had shifted to the subject of Asai's daughter then, still growing in her mother's womb, her sex only just determined. Imai kept Asai talking about what it was like to be a new father, and Asai forgot about the photo. It wasn't until after Ayako was born that Imai told him the real story behind the photograph, after a particularly rough case that had made Asai question whether, with his family only beginning, he really had what it took to be a detective.

"I know how you feel," Imai had said. "I've been where you are, believe me."

"Then how do you find the strength to keep doing this, day after day, knowing there's going to be a lot more cases like this one? Cases we can't solve until it's too late."

Imai's answer: that photograph. Asai thought his partner meant he did it for the kids.

But Imai shook his head. "That was the last trip we all took together while my sister was alive," he said. "One day she went out grocery shopping before the kids got home from school, middle of the afternoon, just like she always did—no reason to think anything bad might happen, right? Except some lunatic with a knife had other plans. He was just out looking to stab someone, didn't matter who, and my big sis just happened to be the first person he saw."

"Sempai, I'm so sorry." And Asai was, though it felt like nothing he said could convey that properly.

Imai cleared his throat. "Yeah, well, what can you do? You can't turn back time. I couldn't do anything to help her then, but I thought maybe, just maybe, I might have a chance to save someone else's sister. Make sure some other kids don't grow up without a mom. And if I can't catch the bad guys before they strike, at least I can bring them to justice like their victims deserve. It's the very least I can do for her. And that's why I decided to become a detective.

"That's what keeps me going," Imai said as he positioned the photograph back in its proper place on the corner of his desk, "whenever I start to feel useless. You're not useless, Asai. Remember that."

But when they'd gotten out of the car on that suburban Tokyo street, he had been. When that fireball came rushing towards them, Asai had cowered behind the police cruiser while Imai was engulfed. Asai gritted his teeth at the memory. It wasn't even that he had hidden that made him so angry. He didn't regret living, and he was sure Imai, wherever he was now, would never forgive him if he'd left Ayako fatherless.

Only, there wasn't anything Asai had been able to do, nothing that would have made an ounce of difference to the outcome. And the futility of knowing that pissed him off.

He tried to push that feeling down over the next several weeks, and was mostly successful. Inoue informed him all investigations into Muraki Kazutaka had been closed (something about orders from above that he didn't have the rank to question), and then Asai was assigned a new partner, and new cases, and he felt useful again. After a while it seemed as though he had slipped into a new kind of normal, without even realizing it.

Then he'd catch his reflection in the window, and see the scars, or he'd open his desk drawer all the way and the photo of Imai's niece and nephew would be there at the back of it, looking up at him, and he'd remember, and it would be a very hard day.

It was one of the easier days, middle of August, that it happened. He and his partner were about to go out for lunch when Asai realized "My badge is gone."

"Gone?" His partner laughed. "You probably just set it down somewhere without thinking."

Only Asai never did that. He always kept it clipped to his belt, even when he was at his desk, ever since the Livertaker case when Imai had joked that someone must have taken his to try and keep them from investigating.

On a whim, Asai opened the drawer with Imai's photograph, and there his badge was, sitting on top of it, where Asai would swear he hadn't placed it. Along with a stem of crape myrtle flowers. If he wasn't mistaken, the same color as the ones that were blooming in the courtyard behind the station.

"Go on ahead without me," he told his partner, grasping that stem tight between his fingers. "I'll catch up."

"You find your badge?"

"Yeah. There's just . . ." Asai's heart raced with hope, irrational though it was, and he couldn't begin to explain it. "There's something I need to check out first."

Sure enough, the crape myrtles matched. But when Asai arrived, there was no one waiting for him in the courtyard. Some people hurried by, to or from lunch or on an errand, but no one stopped to talk to him or acknowledge him beyond a nervous smile and a nod.

And yet.

For some reason Asai couldn't have explained if he tried, it felt like he wasn't alone. For all he'd tried to keep an open mind about the paranormal, things like alien encounters and ghosts, he wasn't sure he'd ever truly believed in them.

Until now. Because it felt like there was someone standing in front of him, staring right at him. Asai felt their presence so strongly, though he saw nothing between him and the crape myrtles' planter but air.

"Thanks, Sempai," he said, not knowing if there really was anyone there to hear him, just sensing that it needed to be said. The last few months had been a struggle, trying to determine where he fit into the old puzzle when his own piece had been so drastically rearranged.

Now, at last, Asai felt he was at a place where he could declare out loud: "I think I'm going to be just fine."

---

It was all Imai could do not to breathe as Asai stood there before him, close enough to touch. Looking straight through him, but not seeing Imai at all. His neck and the side of his face wrinkled with burn scars, like the skin of a melon, arousing all sorts of guilty feelings in Imai that he wished with all his heart he could apologize for, even though he knew the words would change nothing.

Still, Imai knew if anyone would have believed in his ghost, it would be Asai. It warmed him inside to know he had not misjudged.

Only when Asai reluctantly turned to go back inside the station did Imai let out his breath. Not that breathing particularly mattered, being dead, but it was a bad habit he couldn't seem to break.

"You shouldn't'a done that, you know."

"I know," Imai said to his new partner without turning around. He didn't want Natsume to see the completely unrepentant grin that he couldn't seem to shake. "I'm breaking the Zeroth Law of Being Dead. And I know, this is why shinigami aren't supposed to go up to the Living World alone. But it's not like he saw me, is it? Nothing happened. Life goes on as usual."

Natsume said mischievously, as if he were about to suggest a tit-for-tat, "You're just lucky I'm in too generous a mood to report this."

"Oh. Your date with that mortal exorcist went well, then, I take it."

Natsume's face and ears turned as bright a pink as the crape myrtles. Just who was going to be owing whom for his silence? "That's different. She knows all about us already."

"Uh-huh. Maybe I should tell K when we get back and let her decide. See if she still thinks you're ready to go off-leash. I'm sure your old pals in Billing would be tickled to welcome you back."

Natsume crossed his arms over his new Peacekeeper great coat, as if to keep Imai from stealing it off him. "Or we could just agree to keep the details of our respective lunch dates between us."

Imai laughed, feeling lighter than he had in a long time. Being back here, a part of him yearned to walk into the station, go up to the appropriate floor and take his place behind his old desk. The other part of him felt like he was returning to his old school as an adult, finding it much smaller than he remembered. Or, like a crew member from an old sci-fi show, landing on a world that looked just like home and realizing he was the alien.

Asai was going to be fine without him.

And while Asai was out there protecting the living from criminal elements, Imai would concentrate his efforts on those forces the police couldn't see: your vengeful spirits, your youkai, your meddling demons—now that the new ruler of Hell had declared it open season on mortal souls. They would both be too busy to dwell on the old days. Though Imai would find a way to send something nice to the Asai family around the new year. Anonymously, of course.

"Well," Imai grunted as he stretched, "I guess it's back to the grind. Eh, partner?"

"Yep." Natsume sighed. "Just another day in paradise."

"Egads, kid—not you too!"

---

"You sure you didn't forget anything?" Terazuma muttered at the mountain of the Count's luggage that greeted them in Watari's lab.

"If everyone takes two suitcases and a bag each, it should be no trouble at all," the Count said with a wave, completely ignoring the detective's sarcasm. And disgruntled rumblings. "Isn't that right, Watson?"

"Everything should go off without a hitch, milord," the little butler said, as he deftly secured a picnic basket to the top of a rolling case taller than he was.

It was Ukyou Tsuzuki was most concerned about. Wakaba, too, it seemed. "You're sure this is going to work?" she asked Watari. "I've never sent anyone living to Gensoukai before. How do you know we'll be able to bring her back?"

"Dr. Watari and I have been running tests with live rats to be sure," Ukyou assured her. "They've all survived the digitization process and, from what we can tell, their health doesn't appear to be negatively affected in any significant way. They've all come back in what appears to be the same condition as before they left. I feel confident enough in those results to make the trip myself. And confident in Dr. Watari's expertise."

Watari beamed at the praise. "Thank you, Dr. Sakuraiji," he said, clearly tickled that someone around here appreciated his genius enough to call him by that title. "It has been a real pleasure working with you these past weeks. I'm really going to miss you."

"Oh, Doctor," Ukyou laughed, "you'll see me again when I come back!"

"True, true. . . ."

"Am I late?" Kazuma huffed as she dashed into the lab.

Terazuma's head snapped up at the sound of her voice. "She's coming, too?" Which meant, he must have realized in that moment, Kokushungei would be there to greet him when they reached the other side.

"Right on time," the Count told Kazuma. "In fact, now that we're all here, maybe we can hasten the proceedings along, hm?"

"Eager to get over there, are we, Count?" Kazuma said. But half of her words were drowned out when Watari and Wakaba opened the portal, and Kotarou and Kojirou arrived in a halo of light and feathers to usher everyone through.

Even though Tsuzuki was used to the opening of the Suzaku Gate, it never failed to give him gooseflesh with awe and send his heart soaring. He could only imagine what Ukyou must be feeling, seeing it for the very first time. And with a skeptic's mind, at that.

He glanced over, and was relieved to see a wide smile lighting up her face. She beamed at the lights and colors and pleasing aromas radiating from the gate like a child on her first trip to an amusement park.

The proper thing, Tsuzuki realized just a little too late, would be to offer to escort her into that great unknown.

The Count beat him to it. "Shall we, milady?" he said, bending at the waist and offering Ukyou his elbow. Which she took with no hesitation. Like a bride taking her father's arm to the altar. Though the Count's full morning dress might have had something to do with putting the analogy in Tsuzuki's head.

An effect the Count destroyed completely when he added for good measure, "That first step's a real doozy!"

A snort at his own elbow and Tsuzuki turned to see a rare grin on his partner's lips.

"Come on, Tsuzuki," Hisoka said, stepping toward the portal and grabbing up a couple of the Count's bags along the way. "You must be excited to see your Twelve again. I know they'll be excited to see you."

Twelve? You mean Eleven now, don't you?

Maybe that was why Tsuzuki hesitated. It wasn't that he'd been gone too long (at some times in his tenure, years had passed between visits to Gensoukai), but the way he'd been gone. The silence he'd given his shiki while hiding out in the Living World. Tsuzuki wouldn't blame a single one of them if they held a grudge against him for it.

Facing that anger in person was another matter, however. He could hope for the best, but he knew he should prepare himself for a difficult reunion. And there was only one way to find out how each of his shiki would react.

So Tsuzuki grabbed a suitcase and hurried after Hisoka, into the gate.

On the other side, the Capital with Tenkuu at its center spread out below them in a rich tapestry of reds and blues and greens. Alarmed to suddenly find herself falling through sky, Ukyou clutched at the Count tighter; but he reassured her that no harm would come to her, they would simply walk at a normal pace toward the solid ground together.

Off to their side, Watson kicked his little legs as he pushed his stack of luggage in front of him. The shinigami had no trouble orienting themselves, enjoying the sensation of weightlessness for the short time it lasted.

Because when they did reach the ground, they saw that a large party of Gensoukai's residents had turned out to meet them, with Tsuzuki's Twelve front and center.

And Sohryuu did not look happy with what he saw.

If the Count noticed, he gave no indication. "Ahhh," he said blithely, letting out that first deep breath. "Do you smell that, Watson? That is the sweet air of home if ever I knew it."

"I've never been here before, milord," his butler warbled from beneath his stack of luggage.

The air here wassweet. Only when he was breathing it in did Tsuzuki realize how much he had missed it. As if the whole world were lightly perfumed with the scent of ever-blooming flowers. Even Enma-cho could not boast the same—but, of course, the ever-blooming flowers there are just an illusion.

"Come, come, my dear, don't be afraid," the Count said to Ukyou, pointing out the sights. "That peak you see there in the distance is Mount Kurama, home of the tengu. And if memory serves me right, over that way is a particularly exquisite water garden I'm dying to see again. I would so love to take you on a personal tour, once you've had a chance to settle in. What do you think? Is it not the most wonderful place you've ever been?"

"It's like a dream," Ukyou said. Shaking her head as though, even now, she might somehow wake herself up from it. "I've seen pictures of some truly beautiful locations on Earth, but I don't think any place on Earth could be so colorful, and so temperate. So . . . perfect. It's like a paradise."

"But it is a paradise!" the Count said. "We call it the Imaginary World now, but it is the self-same place the ancients called Paradise, or Eden. Home of the gods and all the miraculous creatures that could exist nowhere else. I should know!"

"Have you been here before, Count?" Hisoka asked the question that was on Tsuzuki's mind as well. "You seem to know so much about this world."

"He probably read all about it in his books," Tsuzuki teased.

"Naturally, my dear Tsuzuki. I wrote the book on the place."

Now they were sure he was pulling their leg. And their laughter told him so.

But the Count frowned, as if their skepticism had wounded him. "You really don't believe me. Well, I suppose it has been a while since I last set foot here, and I daresay I'm not the man I was then. I suppose a few things may have changed after millennia of being away—"

"YOU!"

Sohryuu growled as he stomped across the courtyard, making straight for their party. Everyone snapped to attention, even Terazuma and Shungei's joyful reunion put on pause. When a dragon was on the prowl, no one could afford not to be on their guard.

Tsuzuki was sure that "you" had been meant for Hisoka. He could feel his partner tense beside him and knew Hisoka feared Sohryuu's wrath too. The Blue Dragon would not easily forgive having his old nemesis sicced on him when he was trying to defend his master. If it came down to it, Tsuzuki was ready to throw himself between the two of them and plead Hisoka's case.

But it turned out not to be necessary. Sohryuu came within a stone's throw of them and stopped, as if struck still by one of Rikugou's time dilations.

Then they could all see the utter disbelief on his face. "It is . . . it is you, isn't it . . .?"

Before Tsuzuki could take a step toward his shiki, the Count gently detached himself from Ukyou and walked out to meet Sohryuu. "What is this?" he said in a voice filled with fondness. "Don't tell me you didn't recognize me, old friend."

Sohryuu surprised them all, falling to his knees and prostrating himself before the Count. In front of all his subjects, no less. "My Lord! Forgive me—"

"Now, now, let's have none of that." Abashed, the Count hurried to him and pulled Sohryuu back to his feet. "What could you have possibly done that needs forgiving?"

"But how is it possible for you to be here?" Sohryuu's expression was fierce, but Tsuzuki knew it was with the pain of loss rather than anger. "You died."

"Yes. I am dead. But that's no cause for sorrow, my friend. My power in this world may be just a pale shadow of what it once was, but I can still abide in it with you. If you'll suffer me after such a long absence, that is. I would give you a whole list of excuses for why I could not come sooner, but—well, what do they matter now?"

In lieu of an answer, Sohryuu threw his arms around the Count's shoulders in a tight embrace, one that was immediately returned. The kind of embrace that only two souls who have seen the same unprecedented things and shared in the same impossible hardships could share. And so intimate it was difficult to watch without feeling like an intruder.

"Uh, what's going on?" It seemed Terazuma alone had the guts to ask what each one of them was thinking. "You two know each other or something?"

"Of course I know him," Sohryuu said when he had the Count at arm's length. "Every creature in Gensoukai knows this man. That is, every one who is old enough to remember.

"And to think I doubted you. To think I doubted you ever existed." The dragon shook his head at his own folly. "I was beginning to wonder if you had been merely a pleasant dream I had, once upon a time."

Beside Tsuzuki, Hisoka sucked in a breath. But Tsuzuki was too perplexed by the exchange to ask him what it was for.

"Father, what's going on? Who is this man?" Kijin butted in, appearing at Sohryuu's side with Tenkou in tow.

And the Count's whole being lit up as Tsuzuki had only seen him get about a particularly rare vintage of wine. Or Tsuzuki himself, for that matter. "Are these they," he breathed, "the ones I've heard about?" looking at Sohryuu even as he put a disbelieving hand to Tenkou's head and Kijin's shoulder. As if he feared, if he touched them, they might cease to exist. But if he didn't, he could never prove to himself that they were real.

"Now I'd really like an explanation," Kazuma said as she watched, hands on her hips.

"You and me both." With a huff, Terazuma dropped the heavy trunk he had been carrying on his shoulder, and sat down on it to light the cigarette that dangled from his mouth.

Shungei shushed them both.

"You did not tell them?" Sohryuu asked the Count.

"Well. I mean, I had my reasons—"

"This man is the Golden Emperor," Sohryuu told Ukyou and the shinigami, appalled that the Count had neglected to impart that most important bit of information himself. "Or was, I suppose. It was He who created this world."

Tenkou gasped and stared wide-eyed up at the Count. But Kijin could only return the Count a conflicted glare.

Tsuzuki couldn't blame the boy. Of all the stories Kijin had been told about the Emperor, the man who was in a sense more a father to him than Sohryuu, no one had ever known enough to tell him that the Emperor still existed in another realm, or that he knew about Kijin and his sister but had never bothered to visit them. Kijin must have felt betrayed and unloved—the same way Tsuzuki had when he finally learned the truth of who the Count was to him.

But what Tsuzuki had lacked in a father, he had found in these half-siblings he never knew until now were related to him. He couldn't see Kijin and Tenkou the same way ever again. The connection Tsuzuki had felt to them from the beginning felt even truer now. Now that he knew what had brought them together, across the vastness of time and dimensions.

"My apologies." The Count flashed their party a mildly embarrassed smile. "It seems I owe you all an explanation."

"No shit," "For starters," Terazuma and Kazuma groused simultaneously.

But it was Tsuzuki's gaze the Count met when he said, "And I'll give you one—and answer every question you have, thoroughly and to the best of my ability. But first," back to Sohryuu, "I think refreshments and a place to rest are in order. We have a mortal in our presence who requires sustenance." And he nodded in Ukyou's direction. "Make that two mortals."

Sohryuu saw Ukyou's rounded belly then for the first time, and frowned. It was not, however, the negative reaction Tsuzuki first feared it to be. He asked the Count warmly, "Yours?"

Who laughed. "Heavens, no! Although, in a sense . . ."

But the Count clapped and rubbed his hands rather than elaborate further. "In due time, my old friend. But first, we eat. And you catch me up on everything I missed while I've been dead."

---

Everything the Count had missed turned out to be thousands of years of Gensoukai history. And though Ukyou tried her best to follow along with the tales of warring factions and the rise and fall of mythic kingdoms, she found it all a little overwhelming.

Hard not to, when she was surrounded by beasts of legend everywhere she turned. Though the human forms of beings like Suzaku and Byakko went a long way to ease her into accepting the reality of the Imaginary World.

Ukyou found Kokushungei a lot easier to warm to when she wasn't a winged and horned, black flame-enshrouded dragon-lion the size of a small house. (Shungei still had the horns—and the tail, for that matter—but the rest of her was human-looking enough.) The Black Lion couldn't stop gushing about the rich food Sohryuu's servants had spread before them, insisting Ukyou try one delicious new thing after another. "Isn't this just divine?" Shungei mumbled around a dumpling filled with shrimp and some sweet and spicy paste. "We never get treats like this out in the desert."

"Miss Sakuraiji?"

Ukyou looked up at that young voice, and saw a dark-skinned boy of perhaps ten or eleven staring down at her. He wore dhoti trousers, had small tusks, and antlers pointed up through his sandy hair. Something about him seemed familiar, but she struggled to place his face.

"It's me!" he said brightly when he noticed her trouble, "Yali!"

"Yali?" Nonomiya's lion-muntjac shikigami with the ridiculously long tail who had flown Ukyou to safety? "But you're just a child—"

"Yali?" Kazuma stared at him wide-eyed. "Look how much you've grown! It wasn't that long since I last saw you."

Yali reddened and beamed at what, to his kind, must have been high praise. "I leveled up, Miss! Thanks to all the defendin' I did in the battle with the demons, I'm now twice as powerful as last time you were here."

For that, Kazuma felt he deserved a double high-five. "Congratulations! I'm so happy for you, kid! Kochou's gonna flip when she hears."

"Thank you."

Yali sobered at Ukyou's words. Or maybe it was her sudden tears. He wasn't the first shikigami Ukyou had met who seemed unused to the way humans displayed their emotion. Yali was at a loss as to what he should do to help.

But Ukyou didn't need his help. Not anymore. "Thank you," she told him again, "for saving my life."

"Aww, it's nothing, Miss," Yali said, rubbing the back of his neck. "Just doing what any shiki worth his salt would've done."

Still, Ukyou was grateful to him. As she was to Shungei. Neither of them knew her from Adam, but they had both come to her defense when called, without a second thought, and at great risk to themselves and their existence. Maybe it was just their nature, but Ukyou would never stop feeling indebted to them for keeping her safe.

"Alright," Byakko said to the Count, "now it's your turn." And every other conversation fell quiet so no one would miss a word. "I think you owe it to us to tell us where you've been all this time."

"Yeah," Tsuzuki said. "What's all this about you being the Golden Emperor? It seems like a pretty big thing to never mention in thousands of years."

The Count put up a hand, begging their mercy. "Please. It wasn't the lie of omission you make it sound, Tsuzuki. I may have been the man known as the Golden Emperor at one point, when I was alive, but I haven't been him in a very, very long time."

"What do you mean?" said Sohryuu. "You seem just like I remember."

Beside him, Rikugou smiled to himself and drank his sake in silence.

"As you all know," the Count began, "I died in giving all of my power and the last of my living strength to Sohryuu, so that he might subdue Touda and finally defeat the Chaos that threatened this world. In the expulsion of that energy," he said with a fond smile at Kijin, "my children were created. I, however—that is to say, my mortal vessel—had nothing left to sustain it. So, like all newly dead, my soul soon made its way to Meifu and, eventually, the court of the crimson king himself, Great King Enma.

"Back then, Enma-cho was a bleak and hopeless place. There were no ever-blooming cherry trees to enliven the spirit, that was for sure. The Lakes of Fire and Acid were still very much in use, Mortal Hell had not yet been paved over to make way for bureaucratic office space. Everyone had to cross the river when they arrived, and when you tried to do so, animals gnawed at your limbs and hags tore the clothes from your back. I managed to use my charms to bribe a ferryman, so I bypassed most of the misery that a newly dead soul endures upon entering, but I still faced a major conundrum.

"At this point, I had no memory of who I had been in life. Looking back, it seems that in surrendering my power to Sohryuu, I also surrendered some of my personality, and my heart. The very things that made me human. I believe this is what gave birth to you and your sister, Kijin," the Count said to the boy, who nodded in understanding and acceptance, "but it left my soul without an identity to call my own.

"However," he chuckled, "being an inventor of stories by nature, I had no trouble coming up with a new one for myself. So I fancied myself a famous actor, not knowing, of course, that Enma hates actors almost as much as he hates storytellers. Storytellers and actors are professional liars, you see, and there is nothing a judge despises more than lies. Already I was not off to a good start.

"But I gave the cover my all, throwing my whole soul into the belief that I was the most beloved and accomplished actor of my time, and that it would be a great loss indeed if I were simply tossed into some subdivision of Hell like a common thief. I parleyed with Enma for hours on the virtues of fiction, and its ability to reveal the truth, holding up the queue behind me until everyone, demon and deceased alike, began to grow restless and resentful.

"Still, I knew, Enma was not convinced. So I threw down my gauntlet," said the Count, snatching up his sake cup, "and challenged Enma directly, to allow a demonstration of my skills. I said that I was so good at my craft, I could play a better Enma than Enma himself."

Some of the shikigami sucked in their breaths or laughed nervously at the Count's audacity. Only a few, like Sohryuu, remained unamused. "And did you?" Daiin asked from his resting place between Touda's folded legs.

"I played Enma so well," the Count leaned over and said to him in a conspiratorial tone, "that even Enma's own ministers couldn't tell which one of us was their true King. I exaggerated my movements and my pronouncements to the point of parody, believing our audience would see my farce for what it was, but that only made the confusion worse. Humiliated, Enma ordered me to stop my tomfoolery at once. I countered with an order for the guards to seize the impostor—not anticipating that my act had been so convincing, they would take me at my word and arrest the wrong Enma!"

"By which you mean the right Enma!" Byakko laughed, raising a toast. "That's our Emperor, alright!"

"He always was a practical joker," Rikugou said as an aside to Hisoka. "You had to be on your guard any time the Emperor and Genbu got it in their heads to compete and see who could pull off the most impressive prank."

"Poor Daiin still hasn't entirely recovered," Suzaku put in, but the perspiring jug assured them, "It was worth it to see two masters at work."

As for Tsuzuki, he was having a hard time seeing the Enma he knew beaten by parody and pranks. Though the Count's story did add a new layer of understanding to the old rivalry between the two. "That must have pissed King Enma off."

"Like you wouldn't believe," the Count said. "While I reigned over Judgment in his stead, passing sentences down on everyone who came before me, the real Enma was busy plotting his revenge from his cell. Not everyone was fooled by my impersonation, you see, and after three days, Enma's most loyal subjects managed to break him out. The overthrow of my extremely short-lived rule was swift and total (though I was able to cause quite a bit of trouble in the meantime). Stripped of all my pretenses, there was nothing I could do but surrender myself to the fate Enma chose for me. He demanded my name, and I gave him the only one I could remember that held any personal significance to me: Hakutaku."

"Father told me about Hakutaku," Kijin interjected. "He said you met this mysterious creature while out on one of your retreats into the wild. Father said he told you the secret of how to win every shikigami and defeat every demon in existence. But no one else ever saw a creature like the one you described to him."

"A white beast, in appearance like a cat and a hind, with a frightful but benevolent face," the Count mused, "draped in long, shining hair and sporting six horns and nine eyes, three on its head and three on either of its flanks. A creature so full of the secrets of the universe he only appears to those worthy enough to receive his wisdom."

Kijin furrowed his brow. "I went on a quest to find it myself, when I was younger, because I wanted to be wise like you. But I suppose there was never anything for me to find. Was there?"

The Count shook his head almost apologetically. "Hakutaku as such never existed. He was a being I invented as an avatar of myself."

"But why?" said Suzaku. "Why go through all that trouble, just to sell us a fiction?"

For the first time that night, the Count looked genuinely ashamed to answer. He forced himself to, however, knowing his former subjects deserved to know the truth.

"As the creator of this world, I faced the same conundrum all creators face: Did my creations love and obey me because they chose to, because I was a person deserving of their love? Or did they love me because that was simply the way I had made them? And I so wanted to be worthy—or, at least, to believe that all of you had chosen to love me willingly and not felt coerced into your loyalty. I believed that if I told you this White Beast, this Hakutaku, had deemed me wise and heroic enough to be the keeper of all your secrets, you would all come to me of your own free will. Only after I had perpetuated this great lie did I realize I had not freed myself from any ideological hole, but only dug myself deeper into the original one."

To their surprise, it was Sohryuu who snorted and shook his head. "The wisest men often make the greatest fools," he said to the Count. "You didn't think us capable of loving you as our creator and because you were worthy? It had to be one or the other?"

"Kurikara grew to despise me," the Count said, naming the one most conspicuously absent from their supper. "And I failed Touda. I couldn't save him from the forces of darkness."

"You made us true to our natures," Touda said, earning nods and mumbles of assent from the other shiki present. "What greater goodness could you have done us than that?"

"He's right." Suzaku this time, and it heartened Tsuzuki to see her and Touda in agreement. "We loved you because we wanted to. And we wanted to because . . . well, it didn't seem right not to love you."

The others chimed in with their own reasons for loving the Emperor, but Kijin held his tongue. Tsuzuki couldn't blame him. All Kijin knew of the Emperor had been told to him posthumously. Kijin must have built up a lofty vision of what the Golden Emperor had been in his mind, the same way Tsuzuki had—as a collection of heroic deeds. A man of only virtues, no vices or foibles. Even when consciously he knew it couldn't possibly be true.

"Did Enma ever learn the truth?" Kijin asked, and the others' voices quickly petered away to hear the answer.

"He did," said the Count, "and I daresay he felt as deceived as you do, Kijin. But he saw an opportunity there as well. It was one thing when he thought a rare magical beast had fallen into his lap. But the soul of the Golden Emperor—well, I knew Enma would never let me go when he discovered that. I was his captive, but also his tool, his weapon, to use as he saw fit. Which meant I was also a tempting prize for any foe who dared to challenge him. He built the Castle of Candles to act as my prison, but also to hide me from his enemies, and gave me half his mask of invisibility for good measure. And we agreed I should change my name. Even 'Hakutaku' was too conspicuous."

"And so the Emperor was demoted to a Count," Rikugou said with a smile. "I imagine Enma must have appreciated that irony."

"I kept my head down and did my duty, monitoring the candles of the living and reporting any anomalies to my King. It was a lonely existence, but I managed to keep myself from going mad by doing what I did best: inventing new worlds and new friends to populate them. Only this time, they were confined to words on a page."

The books in the Count's study, Tsuzuki mused—like the one I almost got trapped in. The Count's powers may have been diminished in death, but that world and its inhabitants had felt almost as real to Tsuzuki as this one. You may have seen your characters as just words, but to themselves, they had lives and needs and hopes as real as anyone.

And you played with them, too. You acted the part of the Almighty Creator without ever bothering to ask yourself if it was right to treat them as you did. What about free will? Which of them ever had a choice in the life you decided for them?

"My mother wasn't just words on a page." The words of accusation poured out of Tsuzuki the moment they were given half a chance. But he had held them back so long—didn't he have a right to answers, too? Just as much a right as all the others the Count had abandoned? "She had a child," Tsuzuki told him, "and hopes and dreams and feelings of her own. A future. Did you stop for one moment to think about what she wanted? Or just take what you wanted from her and discard her once you were satisfied?"

Across the room, Ukyou had had enough. The discussion had veered too close for comfort, and she didn't want to hear her own story aired in front of all these strangers. Even if it wasn't exactly her story, the parallels were close enough to turn her stomach.

"Excuse me," she said to Kazuma and Shungei. "I think the food might be a bit rich for me. I'm going to take a walk, get some fresh air."

She was asked from every side if she wanted company, or a cup of tea or a bed to lie down on, but Ukyou waved off all their offers. All she wanted right then was to get away from this dinner party, and to be alone with her thoughts.

She put on a polite smile, but Tsuzuki could sense the distress in it from where he sat. He tensed, his need to get answers from the Count at war with the responsibility he felt for Ukyou's situation.

But Hisoka reached for his hand before he could even begin to rise, the bond between them twinging a warning, and Tsuzuki knew that was Hisoka's way of telling him to grant Ukyou her space.

"Don't misunderstand, Tsuzuki," the Count said, pulling Tsuzuki's attention back to him, "I loved your mother from the first word she spoke to me. I tried to deny my own feelings, but I could not deny hers. When it became clear to me she loved me back—"

"But you had to know it was wrong. You were dead, for God's sake! Did Enma know you were sneaking off to the Living World, visiting this living woman, when you were supposed to be watching the candles? Was her husband still alive when this affair of yours was going on?"

"Tsuzuki—"

"How am I supposed to believe you're telling the truth when everything you've ever been to me has been a lie!" Tsuzuki felt his hand curling into a fist beneath Hisoka's, and snatched it away, holding it in his lap beneath his other hand. Holding on to this anger like it was all he had left to defend himself with. "How could you say you loved her when you left her to fend for herself and two children alone? When you left me?"

Tears threatened to rise up but Tsuzuki swallowed them back down. He had to face this, and the Count, directly. And he needed an audience to witness the Count's confession. "You never intended to impregnate her, did you? You never wanted me."

"I didn't think it was possible, no," the Count said. "But just because you were an accident doesn't mean I didn't want you—"

"But you were never there—"

"But I was! I held you in my arms the day after you were born, Tsuzuki! Do you think I didn't want to stay? That day I felt a kind of love I hadn't experienced in millennia—if I had ever felt its exact like before. But when I looked in your eyes and saw they were exactly like mine, then I finally understood the gravity of what I had done. I had put you and your family in danger, just by making you mine. I was supposed to be confined to the Castle, I was bound to it by a sacred oath, and yes, I had shirked by duties to interfere with the workings of Fate. If Enma knew what I had done, he . . ."

"Would he have killed me?" Tsuzuki asked when the Count trailed off. Would he have killed my entire family, to cover up one man's crime?

"I don't know," the Count eventually said. "But I didn't think it worth the risk to find out. That is why I left you. Because I believed it was the surest way to keep you safe. It was one of the hardest decisions I ever made—certainly the hardest since my death. Don't think I didn't regret it, every day that I imagined what it would be like to be there with you, watching you grow up.

"And little Ruka." He chuckled fondly. "She wasn't mine, but I fell in love with her as if she were. She had such an unassuming way about her, such big and trusting eyes—but she understood more about the workings of the world around her than a child of that age ought to. I don't think she was surprised for one moment when you came along.

"I saw her again, years later," the Count added with some sadness, "when she died. She was still so beautiful. Her spirit had not weakened one bit, as if her disease had not been able to penetrate beyond her mortal body."

Tsuzuki looked down in shame. "The disease I gave her, you mean. The one I never knew I was carrying."

"No." The Count seemed surprised that he would say so. "It was a genetic disease. The same cancer that took your mother. I saw the files myself. I had to know I wasn't somehow to blame. You didn't kill your sister, Tsuzuki. You didn't kill either of them. Goodness, is . . . is that what you've led yourself to believe, all these years?"

Tsuzuki had no words to answer with. They all failed him. He could hardly believe what the Count was telling him.

But he wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe so badly. To be absolved of this guilt he'd carried around for the better part of a century. So long, he wasn't sure he knew who he was without it.

"You said you never felt love like you did when you first held Tsuzuki," Hisoka spoke up beside him, a hard edge to his voice, "but if you call the way you've treated Tsuzuki as an adult love, you have a perverted definition of it."

His words landed like a slap, the Count's cheeks flushing beneath them.

"I can't account for my behavior," he said, reaching hastily for his sake, as if to drown any responsibility he ought to feel in it. "My whole life, the only 'children' of mine I knew were the ones I birthed from my imagination. My companions—my friends and my lovers, my teachers and my subjects and my pets. How could I be expected to reconcile the infant I held in my arms with the young man who came to me in death, having known nothing of the in-between?"

"Because he's the same person," Hisoka didn't let up. "Either way, he's your son."

"And I'm a demon," the Count shot back. "You cannot expect me to love the way a human does.

"But I want to learn," he said, softer, turning to Sohryuu, and Genbu, and Suzaku. His one-time loyal subjects, who would not question his sincerity. "That's why I came back. I can never again be the Emperor I was to you before, but I can learn to be the father I should have been to Kijin and Tenkou. If you'll all teach me. And forgive me for being silent for so long."

Kijin looked away, but Sohryuu leaned closer to the Count, laying a hand over his. "You've done nothing that needs forgiving, my Lord."

"You always understood me better than anyone, Sohryuu. But just because you always took my side does not mean I made no mistakes. I failed you, for one. If I had been wiser, if I had been a better man, perhaps my death could have been avoided. But if that means our two children," the Count said with a nod and warm smile toward Kijin, "would have never been born, then perhaps it was not such a failure after all."

Tsuzuki couldn't stand any more. Seeing that coquettish smile draw his shikigami into the Count's thrall was the last straw. He'd thought this so-called retreat meant he and the Count could start afresh, without the mask and the lies between them, but he'd been a fool to hope the Count would ever change his ways. Like the man said: He was a demon. Maybe not from the start, but he was one now. If Tsuzuki couldn't change his parentage, at least he could put as much distance between himself and the Count as Tenkuu allowed.

"Do you want me to come?" Hisoka asked him as Tsuzuki got to his feet.

But just as quickly, Rikugou laid a pinky finger on Hisoka's sleeve. "Actually, Hisoka, I was hoping the two of us might have a moment to talk."

Tsuzuki sent a nod of thanks Rikugou's way. As much as he appreciated Hisoka standing up for him, he wasn't ready for a heart-to-heart just yet.

Besides, there was someone else he owed a sincere apology. And, unlike with Hisoka, he didn't have all the time in the world to say it.

---

Tsuzuki found Ukyou by following the twang of the biwa and the warble of Kouchin's voice toward the koi pond. It seemed Tenkou had found a new playmate in Ukyou, and the two were busy painting and comparing notes on one another's art by lantern light.

Tsuzuki didn't want to interrupt. If the setting were a bit different, he might have imagined it as a tender scene between mother and daughter, coloring with crayons after a day of school and work. The sort of scene that might have unfolded any night of the week in his own childhood home, before he came along.

Kouchin spotted him, but didn't let on until she had finished with her song. Then, with a tip of her head, in that voice like honey: "Good evening, Master Tsuzuki."

He saw Ukyou stop in mid-sentence, and turn to see where Kouchin was looking.

Tenkou was less reserved in her reaction. "Big brother! Come see what I drew!"

Tsuzuki's heart skipped in his chest at that word. Big brother. How quick children were to adopt new truths. Seems a little backwards, though, doesn't it, Tenkou? When I came along thousands of years after you.

"Let's see what you made," Tsuzuki said, going over to join them at their writing desks. The wobbly figures Tenkou had drawn looked nothing like those they were supposed to represent, but he complimented her on them anyway. "Did Miss Ukyou help you with that?"

He spared a sympathetic wink and a smile for Ukyou as he said it, and was relieved when the smile, at least, was returned.

"Mm-mm," Tenkou shook her head, "I made it all by myself. Miss Ukyou showed me how to make the kanji, though."

"I didn't know what to paint so I decided to practice my calligraphy," Ukyou said, glancing fondly at the little girl. "I haven't done it seriously since university, and I'm afraid it shows."

"I think your penmanship is lovely." That was the truth, though Tsuzuki would be the first to confess that he didn't have much of an eye for it. The poem on the right side seemed to him to be exquisitely and gracefully rendered, a picture in words of autumn leaves floating down a stream. The names on the left—Ukyou's and the characters for "Count" and "Hakutaku"—a little less so, educational as they were meant to be, but in a hand no less practiced.

"Tenkou," Kouchin said suddenly, "why don't we take your painting back to the party with us and show it to your father and the Count. I'm sure they will be delighted to see what you've created."

Chock up the ability to read a room as another one of Kouchin's many talents. It seemed she knew even before Tsuzuki what he most wanted to ask for but couldn't find the words to do so.

Though, by the shy way she avoided his gaze, he couldn't be sure Ukyou felt the same way about being left alone in the garden with him.

"Are you feeling alright?" Tsuzuki asked her tentatively. "The food here can be a bit heavy, if you're not used to it. And being mortal . . ."

But Ukyou quickly shook her head. "It's not that. The food is delicious. It's the company that's a bit too much for me."

"Mm~ I can see that." Tsuzuki sat down behind Tenkou's writing desk, leaning back on his hands to watch the first fireflies of the evening play amid the branches of a weeping willow. "Meeting dragons and phoenixes and talking pots for the first time does tend to have that effect on a person."

Ukyou laughed. "They were very kind to me, though. And very generous. I feel like I'm in a real-life fairy tale," she said, indicating the rich silk crepes the shikigami had lent her. "Or one of those historical dramas you see on TV."

Tsuzuki hadn't had time to remark on it at the party, but the vibrant magentas and aquamarine and sunny yellows Sohryuu's old governess had chosen for her brought out the healthy glow in Ukyou's cheeks, and the loose robes gathered with a sash under her breasts flattered without either pronouncing or hiding her rounded belly. A spray of honeysuckle tucked behind her ear completed the ensemble. Ukyou might have felt like she was playing dress-up, but she looked to Tsuzuki as if she already fit into this world.

She smiled to herself at a sudden memory. "Tenkou tried to explain to me how she was born—if that's even the right word for it. I didn't understand it all, but I'm not sure if that's because a child explained it to me, or just that all this mythology stuff defies the laws of nature as I know them."

"Probably a bit of both," Tsuzuki conceded. The best way to enjoy Gensoukai, he had found, was to accept it at face value and not overthink anything's origin story. "Thank you for keeping Tenkou occupied. She may be thousands of years old, but she still has a child's attention span. I'm sorry if she was a nuisance to you."

"Not at all."

But Ukyou grew quiet, and retreated farther within herself. "This might seem coldhearted, but part of me hopes this child is a boy. I'm afraid if it's a girl, it will be that much harder for me to leave it."

"Then, you've made up your mind?"

Ukyou nodded. "I was never all that sure I wanted to be a parent. When I thought about my future with Kazutaka—I did still imagine a future with him, even though he kept me at a distance—I took it for granted that there would be children, but I never thought much about bearing and raising them myself. I'm more grateful to him now than I ever was, for distancing himself from me. After spending time with Tenkou, I'm more sure than ever that I don't have that mothering instinct in me."

Tsuzuki wasn't sure what would be right to say here. He no more wanted to be a parent to that child than Ukyou, but he could not deny his responsibility. Yet here he was, prepared to surrender his child and its mother to another world and others' hands. Content to forfeit his say in their care.

"In any case," Ukyou continued on when Tsuzuki remained silent, "I know I'm not prepared or qualified to raise a child who's superhuman, with superhuman powers. But the Count seems eager to be the father to it and Kijin and Tenkou that he wasn't able to be to you, and Sohryuu's governess has already insisted on overseeing the child's upbringing herself."

Tsuzuki supposed he could take some reassurance from that. Baaya wouldn't let the child come to any harm on her watch. She was a tough old dragon even Sohryuu didn't like to oppose.

"The Count's assured me that, after the birth, and when I'm well enough to return to Meifu, there are people there who can wipe my memory of the last year before sending me back to the Living World."

"I can understand why you wouldn't want to remember," Tsuzuki said. "After the things you've seen." And all because of me. Because I dragged you into this. I forced this fate on you.

"There's this question they ask you when you first begin to study logic and ethics: Is it better to know. As a scientist, I always thought, yes, of course, it's always better to know. But I think now," Ukyou said, "I've changed my mind. I just want to go back to my old life, and I don't think I could do it knowing that places like Hell exist. Or here, for that matter," she added with an awe-struck roll of her eyes. "I mean, can anything on Earth compare? So please don't take it the wrong way, Tsuzuki, that I want to forget you, too."

Tsuzuki surprised himself. He laughed. No, he wasn't offended one bit. "I think if I were in your shoes, I wouldn't want to remember me either."

"Maybe one day I'll see you again," when she had died, Tsuzuki knew she meant but would not say, "and then I'll be happy to recall who you were and what you meant to me. And you can tell me what sort of person our child became."

Tsuzuki couldn't keep the cheerful veneer up anymore. Ukyou's calm demeanor, her bittersweet smile—all they did was remind him that he had ruined her life, and nearly ended it, with his selfishness, his impulsiveness, and poorly thought-out plans. He was desperate to unburden himself to her as he had done with Hisoka.

But Ukyou seemed to already know where he was going, and stopped him before he could get more than a few words out. "Please, I don't want to hear it."

"But you must be angry with me. Don't you hate me for what I did to you?"

Ukyou's smile finally failed her then, and she looked away.

"I did hate you," she confessed, "for a time. When I was sitting in that cell in Hell. I blamed you for putting me there and I cursed your name, and your face." And rightly so. "I really thought that I would die—or else be tormented by demons to the point I wished I could. And I wasn't sure which would be worse."

Tsuzuki waited for her accusations to land on him, like a scourge lashing across his back. He deserved to feel that pain. He didn't know how to make sense of his guilt without it.

"But what good does any of that do now?" Ukyou said. "I can't go back and change any of it, and I bear just as much responsibility for last new year's eve and its consequences as you do. The only person I would be hurting now by hating you would be myself. And I don't think this child should come into the world cursing his or her father's name, do you?"

Ukyou started to get to her feet then, and Tsuzuki forgot about his penance for the moment to help her up. Realizing only after she chastised him for it that he was treating her like the fragile creature she wasn't.

And she was right. Whether it was a matter of DNA or the trials she had endured, that child inside her had made Ukyou stronger. Tsuzuki had little reason to worry that, once she was back home and all this just like a dream, she would thrive in her old life and find some new way to make the Living World a better place. Not in spite of what she'd been through, but because of it. Even if she wasn't entirely aware.

"There is one thing I wanted to tell you," Ukyou said as if just remembering. As though she weren't sure the two of them would ever have another chance to speak while she lived. "The Count and I have discussed it and we've agreed that, no matter the sex, we want to call the child Ruka."

Ukyou might as well have slapped him. Tsuzuki was stunned to speechlessness.

"That was your sister's name, wasn't it? The Count told me about her. I guess he knew her when she was a child. I . . . I gather that she meant a lot to you, so I hope it's alright—"

"Alright?" Tsuzuki breathed—about all he could do through the unbearable tightness in his chest. Damn that Count. He'd always be a bastard but he was bound and determined to win Tsuzuki's heart, by any tricks he could. "I'd be honored. I'm sure my sister would say the same, if she could be here."

Assured, Ukyou beamed. "It means 'light' in Latin, too, if I'm not mistaken. Appropriate for someone who might just end up being the next Emperor of this world. Or Empress."

"What?" Tsuzuki blinked.

"Well, it is in his or her blood," Ukyou said to the look on Tsuzuki's face, cradling her belly in her hands. Strange how it didn't fully occur to Tsuzuki until she said those words, but how right and natural it seemed to hear it out loud.

"And I've received a sign—even though I didn't think I believed in signs. Only, as I left the dinner party for some fresh air, I was startled by this noise in the garden. I looked over, and this kirin, of all things, came walking out of the bushes toward me. I only knew what it was because I recognized it from the beer label. Only it was far more beautiful, Tsuzuki. The most beautiful creature I've ever seen. Our eyes met, just for a moment, but in that moment I was overcome with the most peaceful feeling. As if it were . . . well, I don't know how else to describe it but to call it pure Love."

A kirin. Imagine that. Tsuzuki was overcome with awe just thinking that one had shown itself here, in the Palace where he was, not that long ago. And he had missed it. He was bitterly jealous and happy for Ukyou at the same time, that she had been able to witness something so rare and wondrous.

Though he had always hoped that, if a kirin were to appear in Gensoukai again, it would appear to him.

"I told Kouchin what I saw," Ukyou went on, smiling down at her belly, "and she said that kirin only appear when a great ruler or a sage is about to come into the world, and that no one's seen one in Gensoukai for ages. Until now.

"So you see, Tsuzuki, I can't stay angry at you because everything seems to be working out the way it should be. If I still needed proof that little Ruka and I are going to be fine, then tonight I finally got it."

---

No five-alarm fires this time. No sinking ships or visits from shinigami.

It was the quiet that ultimately convinced Oriya that Muraki was really and truly gone. A month had passed since Oriya received his final instructions, and since then he'd not had a single sign that Muraki was still out there.

Neither had there been any sign of Ukyou. Given that, and the condition of her house, Oriya knew he would have to accept what he had prayed fervently was not true: that Ukyou was dead. And what Muraki had told him to the contrary had been nothing more than false hope. Just a well-intentioned lie.

Knowing Ukyou was gone, however, was one thing. Believing it was proving difficult.

Still, as the time for Obon in Kyoto rolled around, Oriya lit a chouchin lantern in each of their memories, Muraki's and Ukyou's. Neither of them had any family left. Someone ought to light the flames to guide their souls home, and as the closest thing to kin, who better to do it than he?

There were celebrations to attend, and steady business at the Kokakurou to oversee. Oriya had little time to spare a thought or a prayer for his lost loved ones. Not until late, as the summer sun was setting, did he manage to escape to the veranda for a smoke and a quiet moment's reflection.

The sound of something falling from the cherry tree startled Oriya from his thoughts. He hurried over to see what had fallen, and was surprised to see the chouchin he had lit for Ukyou on the ground, crumpled and torn.

"Don't you know it's bad luck to make offerings to those still living?"

Oriya looked around wildly for the source of that strange voice. It didn't sound human. Rather, the sort of sound a bird would make, if it could speak better Japanese than a parrot.

A rustling in the cherry's branches, and he looked up. There, crouched on a sturdy limb, was a tengu. At least, it looked enough like some artists' renderings for Oriya to recognize it as such. Like a man with wings and a balding crow's face.

"What do you want with me, tengu?" Oriya demanded of it. Though he was having a little trouble believing what he was seeing was real, he did not want the creature to disappear on him either. "And what do you mean by 'still living'? Ukyou's dead."

"But she isn't," the tengu said, as though he found the misunderstanding amusing. "She wishes me to tell you that she is well, and not to fear for her, for she is in a safe place. But you should prepare. When she returns to you she will have need of your care and your friendship more than ever."

Oriya had more than friendship to offer, if ever Ukyou were ready for it.

But he knew better than to get his hopes up. This might be a trick. Maybe even one of Muraki's—or something infernal that had dealings with Muraki. "How do I know you tell the truth?"

"I was told to look for a cherry tree blooming out of season," the tengu said, even as he was perched in it. "Have I come to the wrong place?"

Oriya couldn't say he knew of any other cherry trees that bloomed all year round, in Kyoto or any other part of Japan. Ukyou would know of his because she had given it to him.

Still, he crossed his arms. "I'm going to need more than that."

At that, the tengu laughed. "She thought you might say so."

A paper envelope fluttered to the ground, and Oriya bent to pick it up. He wished he could say his name written across one side was in her handwriting, but he could not be sure.

He almost tore it open to read what was inside right then and there, but he had more questions for the tengu.

When Oriya looked back up into the tree, however, the tengu was gone. Leaving behind him hope, and one or two shed feathers.

---

"Are you sure you want to do this, and go through it all over again? Hell, are you sure Kannuki's okay with it?"

Terazuma snorted—which perhaps should have told Kazuma all she needed to know about where he stood on the matter. "To tell the truth, I think Kannuki preferred me the way I was. Shungei had a way of bringing out my feminine side—"

"Tch. Yeah, right," Kazuma and Kokushungei said at the same time, like identical twins finishing one another's thought.

Which brought Terazuma to his main concern. "Never mind me. Are you sure you want to do it? Both of you, I mean. This has to be, what," he said to the shikigami, "the most compatible partnership you've had in millennia? You sure you want to give that up?"

"Not gonna lie. It has been nice." Beefy arms folded over her chest and a serious expression on her face, Shungei didn't want to give much away. This must have been rough on her, to be asked to choose between a master she had grown to adore, and one whose aura matched hers like a pair of gloves. It wasn't like Terazuma and Kazuma could split her, work out some sort of arrangement where one would be her host weekdays and the other, weekends.

"But." Shungei flashed Terazuma a feral grin. "Compatibility isn't everything. Is it, Hajime?"

No, it was not. Heaven knew he and Kannuki should never have worked out as partners, let alone lovers, but somehow they had. Though Terazuma still had some work to do, some ground to make up, to earn his place by her side. He had been coasting on his sense of humor and charming good looks for too long.

"If this experience has taught me anything," Kazuma added her two cents, "it's that I'm just not ready to be anyone's master. Let alone their host organism. Too much responsibility."

"Oh, is that so, Ms. Peacekeeping Secretary?"

"Are you questioning my sincerity, Detective?"

"Come on. It had to've felt good, playing the hero, slaying the dragon."

"Oh, sure. Good like a full-body root canal." But Kazuma couldn't help a lopsided smile. "I guess it's good we're doing this now, before I get too used to have another consciousness in my head."

"Can we just get to it?" Shungei cut in, dancing about in uncharacteristic anxiousness. "I want to rekindle my fiery romance with Hajime, already!"

"You're drooling again, cat."

"Eh, you love that about me, admit it."

That Terazuma did, for some reason. But he would never admit it.

He and Kazuma clasped one another's hands, both sobering the instant the ritual commenced. The proper transfer of a shikigami from one master to another required the consent of both, and this time Terazuma could say with absolute confidence that he had not been duped, he knew precisely what he was getting into, and he welcomed it, complications and all.

It wouldn't be till he got back to his own world that he would feel Shungei's consciousness riding shotgun alongside his own, but he could feel the surge of power, of ownership, rushing down Kazuma's palm to her fingertips and into his. There was a heat to it, like the little burn that remains in the skin after handling chili peppers. Terazuma found it empowering.

He could also see the moment that same feeling left Kazuma. As if an actual fire had been doused in her eyes.

But she smiled, and he didn't doubt her relief when she exhaled. "It's done," she said. She was free.

Though Shungei seized her up in one last bone-crushing bear hug for good measure.

"I would say 'Take good care of her, Hajime,'" Kazuma said over Shungei's shoulder, "but let's be honest. Who's taking care of who, here?"

---

The gardens of Rikugou's estate never failed to lull Hisoka's soul into a state of sleepy peace. Perhaps it was an indication of how deep his bond with Rikugou had become, but Hisoka could swear he was starting to understand the whispers of the trees and vines that grew there, as they talked and sang and laughed and argued amongst themselves.

Or gave Hisoka a gentle nudge: Behind you.

Waking from his meditation, Hisoka turned and looked up to the roof. Where Touda crouched, seeming surprised behind his visor that Hisoka had noticed his silent approach.

"Still keeping an eye on me?" Hisoka shouted up to him.

And, caught out, Touda came down to perch at the edge of the roof. "Perhaps I never needed to." He hesitated with what came next, but Hisoka could feel his desperation to ask: "How did you do it, Hisoka? How did you tame your serpent?"

"You knew about the yatonokami?" Why did that not come as any surprise?

"A snake recognizes a snake," Touda said, mirroring another phrase Hisoka had had thrown his way, not so long ago. "You could have been consumed by that seed of Chaos in you, easily, but you weren't. If anything, it seems as though you have molded it completely to your will. So how did you do it?"

How could Hisoka explain, the shady bargains he had made with an evil god and the torment Yatonokami's presence in his soul had put him through? It came to Hisoka suddenly, like a shot, and when it did he knew it was the truth Touda was looking for.

"The same way you tamed yours in the end, I imagine," he told Touda. "You found something you cared about more than yourself."

Touda opened his mouth to respond or refute, but thought better of it. His shoulders dropped in concession. It was true. The shackles on his power, both self-imposed and imposed by others, were not what held the destructive impulses back in his own soul. They may have been physical reminders of his need for self-restraint, but it was love that moved him more than any other force. As it moved every bonded shikigami in his world.

In that way, we're more alike than we seem. Hisoka had never given much thought to his similarities with Touda before. He had spent so much time after Kyoto distrusting the snake for nearly ending Tsuzuki.

Perhaps even then Hisoka had had an inkling of those similarities, and something in his subconscious had warned him that they would still be too painful to acknowledge. If not for the desperation he had endured in Tsuzuki's absence, he might never have had the courage to face Yatonokami, and the truth about himself, willingly.

"Hisoka, here you are! I should have known to try Rikugou's garden first before traipsing all over Tenkuu looking for you."

Hisoka turned to Tsuzuki on instinct, and when he looked back up at the roof, Touda was already disappearing over the ridgepole. Which was just as well.

Tsuzuki didn't seem to notice anything amiss as he stared out at the garden, and breathed deep. "It never fails to make me fall in love with it all over again, each time I come here. I have good memories of digging in this dirt."

That Hisoka had no trouble believing. "Must be something in the trees. I don't hear Yatonokami's thoughts in my head or feel his presence when I'm here, like the place puts him to sleep or something."

At the mention of Yatonokami, Tsuzuki sobered.

"Why didn't you just tell me what you were?"

And there it was, the question Hisoka had been running from. He had known it would eventually catch up with him. He remembered the promises they'd made each other on the Liver-taker case, to have no more secrets between them. Promises that would soon be broken. That had to stop right here.

"Because I was ashamed," Hisoka said. "Even though I knew it wasn't anything I had control over. Maybe because I had no control over it. And because I thought, if you knew the truth, you would see me as a monster."

"And you didn't think that, knowing what I am, that might bring us closer together?"

The thought had crossed Hisoka's mind. More than once. And because of that, there were times he had come so close to telling.

However, "Do you really think that's what would have happened? That we would have bonded over our cursed natures? I know you, Tsuzuki. I know the guilt you carry around with you because of what you are, and I knew if I told you the truth, you'd only find some way to blame yourself for that, too, even though you had nothing to do with it."

Tsuzuki opened his mouth to refute Hisoka, but he must have known it wouldn't have been a very honest response.

"But didn't you think I had a right to know?" he tried instead. "As your partner, I mean. No, as someone who loved you."

The past tense stabbed into Hisoka like a thorn. But he told himself not to read into it. Tsuzuki probably didn't mean it that way.

Though that did cut to the heart of Hisoka's problem.

"Maybe I was afraid you wouldn't after I told you. I was afraid that the only reason you came back to me in Kyoto was that you thought, if someone as human as me could love something like you, then maybe you weren't such a monster after all. Maybe you weren't beyond saving.

"But if it was all a lie, if I'd never been that human to begin with . . ."

Hisoka swallowed the rest, some irrational fear coming over him that if finished that thought, Tsuzuki's old self-loathing would come back with a vengeance, and it would be like they hadn't moved a day beyond Kyoto. Hisoka didn't think he could bear it if they went back there now. Please. Don't stop loving me for this.

With the truth out, all that stood between them now was a wall of their own making. Maybe someday they'd wake up and find it had crumbled down in the night, but it was going to be some time before they got there.

Their trust in one another wasn't the issue. That had never really left. But neither could say how long it would take to forgive himself.

For now, it was enough for Tsuzuki to throw Hisoka's own words back at him: "You're human, Hisoka. I guarantee it.

"Er, well," he amended after a moment, "as human as I am, anyway. For whatever that's worth."

"Shut up, Tsuzuki, you've ruined it."

"Wull, I didn't mean that like it's a bad thing. . . ."

"Ahh, perfect," Rikugou said as he walked out onto the terrace, Sohryuu not far behind. "Just the two people I was hoping to see. And look who else I happened to run into~"

On his other side, Kurikara muttered a sullen greeting. It seemed that neither dragon was very excited about being there, and being expected to make nice with one another was the ultimate indignity.

"It's been ages since Kurikara stepped foot inside the Capital as anything but a conquerer," Rikugou said with a cheer that didn't quite match his words. "In honor of that milestone, I thought the five of us might celebrate with a game. What do you think? I had in mind something along the lines of poker." And so saying, with a flick of his wrist, he made a couple decks of playing cards appear in his hand, seemingly out of thin air.

Tsuzuki brightened at the suggestion, practically bouncing like a puppy. "Ooh! Draw, stud, or hold 'em? My skills might be a bit rusty, but I think I remember all the rules."

"Hold on. You want me to play a game of deception with a fortuneteller and an empath?" Kurikara huffed in outrage. "What kind of idiot do you take me for?!"

"I never thought I'd hear myself say this," Sohryuu grumbled, "but in this matter, Kurikara, I agree with you utterly."

"The fortuneteller will deal, if that puts the opposition to rest," Rikugou said, a smile on his face but his uppermost pair of eyes glaring in irritation. "Just humor me, will you? It's not every day I have two dragons and two masters under my roof."

"Former master, in my case, I suppose," Tsuzuki said sullenly.

But Rikugou said, "Oh, I don't know, Tsuzuki. You should try summoning me in the real world sometime. You might be surprised by the result. As long as you don't ask me to go against Master Hisoka or his wishes, that is," he added in a somewhat threatening tone.

"There you go again," Sohryuu said to him. "Do you really think you can keep up this folly of serving two masters? After the way it turned out the last time?"

"Whatever do you mean? I thought it turned out rather well in the end, all things considered. And let's not forget, Hisoka was able to summon you in the real world," the Astrologer fired back, "when he was still just a rookie."

That got under the Blue Dragon's scales. Sohryuu did not like being one-upped as a matter of principle, let alone in front of Kurikara. "That was different. He was just a conduit. It was Tsuzuki's call I answered."

"I fail to see what's so different about it," Rikugou said, smiling smugly to himself, as though he rather thought Sohryuu had made his point for him. "Two in one, one in two . . . As far as I'm concerned, serving Tsuzuki and serving Hisoka are one and the same thing."

"Maybe we can all get served some tea," Kurikara said, while Rikugou started to shuffle the deck, "and some snacks while we're at it. If you're going to insist on keeping us here with this nonsense through the lunch hour."

As the three shikigami settled themselves down around the low table, Hisoka glanced over at Tsuzuki and found his gaze returned. Just a small smile passed between them, but it was as though Tsuzuki had reached out to him and squeezed Hisoka's hand, and a small part of that wall cracked and crumbled away.

One day Hisoka would tell him about his conversation with Enma—well, the parts that concerned Tsuzuki, anyway—and they would talk frankly about how this partnership of theirs could be expected to last another hundred years, or a thousand. It still felt too daunting to Hisoka to try and think of his future on such a scale.

The next few hours were an easier matter. Hisoka intended to win, and fine by him if he had to use his empathy to do it. Incurring the wrath of two dragons was no longer that frightening a prospect after calling King Enma's bluff.

---

Notes: {lyrics} once again are from "Elusive Butterfly" by Bob Lind.

More information about the mythical Hakutaku, aka Bai Ze, can be found on Wikipedia. Mine is a very loose rendition, but it's a fascinating and weird creature, better explored as a character, I think, in Hozuki's Coolheadedness.

Lastly, all my love and thanks to everyone who has stuck with me on this more than a decade long trip, and everyone who just recently discovered it—for all the comments and reactions and encouragement. I don't know how I ever would have finished it without you.

I doubt I'll write anything in this fandom nearly this big again, but Yami no Matsuei will always loom large in my heart, and I credit that in no small part to the wonderfully supportive and open fans it has had over the years. So, again, thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.